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Kogan gets jump on Acer and Samsung with first Google Chromium laptop

Agora 12in laptop costs £269 and ships on 7 June

Australian manufacturer Kogan has beaten Acer and Samsung to market by launching the world's first laptop running Google's Chromium OS, priced at £269.

Key features of the Agora laptop include an 11.6in WXGA widescreen HD LED display, Intel Celeron M ULV processor running at 1.3GHz, and 30GB of SSD storage.

The 1.52kg laptop is shipped with 1GB of DDR2 RAM, and is capable of supporting up to 4GB.

The Agora packs in a number of ports, including three USB, Ethernet, HDMI and VGA connections. There is also a built-in 1.3-megapixel webcam as well as the standard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.

Kogan claims that the Agora boots up in 4.5 seconds and has a battery life of 3.5 hours.

Google's Chromium OS is an open source project, making it a constant work in progress, explained Ruslan Kogan, chief executive of Kogan.

"[The Chromium] system will improve over time as new features and improvements will keep getting introduced by the open source community," he said.

"What we've found from talking to our customers is that many of them are already using cloud services without even realising it. They're uploading photos to services like Flickr, storing all their contacts in Gmail, and even hosting files on DropBox."

The Agora laptop is set to start shipping on 7 June. It has similar specifications to the Acer and Samsung Chromebooks that are due to start shipping this month.

The Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is set to ship with a 12.1in display with a resolution of 1,280x800. The model has a 300 nit display, which the manufacturer claims is 40 per cent brighter than standard laptop screens.

Other key features include an Intel Atom dual-core processor, 1-megapixel HD front-facing webcam, two USB 2.0 ports, a 4-in-1 memory card slot and a claimed eight hours of battery life.

Meanwhile, Acer is to offer a slightly smaller and lighter Chromebook with an 11.6in screen and a weight of 1.34kg. The device features HDMI output and six hours of battery life. Aside from this, it has the same specifications as the Samsung Series 5.